


Ordinary

by Shadsie



Series: Wounds in the World [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Dimensions, Fantasy, Gen, Generic Narrator, Low Fantasy, Modern Setting, Modern Setting Fantasy, first-person narration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-15 23:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9264434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadsie/pseuds/Shadsie
Summary: An Otherplane where creatures thought of as merely myth reside starts bleeding into the physical world.  The Narrator could no longer deny what they were experiencing when the "delusions" began to become obnoxiously persistent.  The one-winged gryphon warned of a coming war because, if nothing else, humans rarely reacted well to change.





	

**Author's Note:**

> An experimental first-story in a story-series idea I have about an extraordinary hidden-world bleeding into the physical world. (It's not really a new idea... You can say I have some influence from "Blood Blockade Battlefront" except my world isn't a demonic New York, it's mostly benign mythic creatures revealing themselves in a suburb of Philadelphia and spreading out / coming over from different points from there). 
> 
> It's not actually a recent idea of mine, nor the actual first story I wrote along this idea - I have the beginnings of a story about gryphons living in my area on my hard drive as well as a story about a teenage girl infected with the energies of the other world and turning into a rat-creature that I *hope* is on one of my hard drives / that I hope I haven't lost - the latter being based directly off a dream I had. Pretty much the idea for the story-set ties back to the dream, which involved a bleeding over of myth into reality and a reaction by some people to try to kill everything mythic rather than embrace it. That is ultimately the direction I have for the series: there being a kind of social upset from the encroachment of the mythic world onto ours, with some people embracing it but others hell-bent to hunt down and destroy innocent creatures, the main theme being "Peoples' reaction to change" or a kind of metaphor for the effects of social change.

**Wounds in the World**

  1. Ordinary



 

S.E. Nordwall

 

 

It began with a tiny mermaid complaining loudly as I held her in the palm of my hand. 

 

I was wandering on a summer day at the edge of a stream, examining the minnows in the shallows.  I had dipped my hands into the cool water of a shadowed bit of shore, shepherding the darting creatures toward the sands in an attempt to capture just one to gaze upon before letting it free.    
  
I was successful in my hunt and just as I lifted a fat little fish with pale golden scales and brought it into the sunlight I found, instead, a miniature woman with the tan-gold tail of a minnow.  Her hair was lanky and blond.  Her eyes were fierce.  Her voice was high and squeaky – something one would expect out of such a tiny creature.  I stared, stunned, for at least a minute before I numbly apologized ad lowered her gingerly back into the stream. 

 

I dismissed the event as a dream for a long time.  Everything else about that day had been perfectly real, but I’d convinced myself that I’d dreamed it.  A great many things can feel real and logical in a dream while one thing is just… off.  It took later sightings of extraordinary things to garner my attention – and even after making friends on the other side of the ordinary world I am still not completely convinced of what apparently has become my new reality. 

 

An angel with mottled wings like those of a hawk sat on the roof of the apartment I rent in a big sub-divided house.  As I stepped into the parking-area one afternoon to go to the grocery store she waved to me and asked “What’s up?”  I blinked and she remained, stretching her wings out and craning her chin to the sky like a sunning cat. 

 

Of course I thought that my brain was going crazy, just like any sensible citizen of the industrialized world in the twenty-first century would.  And, of course, when taking a walk around my neighborhood on Christmas Eve to look at the lights on my neighbors’ houses, I saw a sleigh and a line of robust deer in the sky.  Stardust shimmered off their hooves.  I wondered if I had a disease of the brain that was reverting my mind back into a childhood state, however, I was deeply afraid of seeing a doctor about my delusions because I enjoy my freedom far too much to risk getting myself locked away or having my brain turned to oatmeal by powerful drugs.  I am by no means against medicinal aid for psychiatric issues, but I have had experiences best left unsaid in regards to the most powerful of society’s controlling agents. 

 

I found out later that Santa Claus does indeed deliver presents to worthy recipients, but since he is a myth existing on the Otherplane, he leaves the tangible gifts to be bought, sold, made and given by human hands.  The true gifts that he brings to children are abstract things – qualities of the heart.  The being of legends leaves in his wake presents such as inspiration, creativity, joy, hope and courage. 

 

Once I’d accepted my connection to a normally-unseen world, I asked him for the gift of courage the very next year despite the fact that my childhood ended decades ago.  Instead, I was given the less fortunate gift of empathy in the form of an illness that holiday season, which forced me to appreciate the pain that some people go through on a chronic basis.  I do believe that I became just a little bit kinder to sick family members and neighbors, but I would have liked a different present all the same.  Be careful what you ask Saint Nicholas for – he may decide that you need something other.  Abstract gifts can be dangerous.  

 

So, how did I come to accept this new world?  It kept itself within my senses until I could no longer ignore it.  When every walk in the woods turned butterflies into fairies and one is almost run over on a trail by a racing one-winged gryphon – and comes out of the ordeal with bruises from being knocked to the ground, a new reality becomes impossible to ignore.  Either that; or my brain has merely decided that delusion is so persistent that the best course of action was just to run with it.    
  
I’ve learned a great many things just by watching this new world around me.  For instance, did you know that unicorns love beer?  It’s true – or at least for the local herd that lives in the nearest state park.  I see them along the roadways now and again, nuzzling at the half-emptied cans discarded along the ditches.  I watched the big black stallion that seems to lead the Tyler Park herd snatch a can right from an open cooler used by a pair of fishermen.  Such dainty beasts they are with their long legs, delicate lions’ tails and splayed hooves.  They are also rather dangerous drunks. 

 

I met the one-winged gryphon again as I walked along the field where I pick raspberries in the summer.  He recognized me and apologized for running into me.  He became a friend after that.  His name is Quassey and he is an honored member of a flock of his kind that lives in my area.  He lost his wing running into a small plane.  These things were not supposed to happen, of course, and were only happening of late.  His world had never before intersected with mine in a physical way, he told me – the beings on the Otherplane could always see it – the world of humans and conventional wildlife, but we could not see them.  Occasionally, some cat or dog, fox or rabbit would be aware of the presence of the “mythic” creatures, but generally, it did not happen. 

 

Quassey told me that there was some history told among his people that humans used to see them – and the mermaids, the unicorns and the other things that we have in the recent generations relegated to the realm of “fantasy,” but that that it was unprecedented that he should have a physical run-in with an object belonging to our technology.  The pilot of the plane had been gravely hurt, but never knew what hit him. Quassey, himself, had not stuck around to learn of his further condition or if the man had any memories of seeing him, for he had been likewise gravely injured and had been seen to by members of his tribe. 

 

“I have passed right through your machines before,” he told me.  “I did not give any thought to the direction of my flight in relation to the aircraft those two years ago.” 

 

He’d been quite surprised when he’d run into me in the park, too, after watching his bounding into my body have a physical effect on me. 

 

“We of the mythic beings have been talking amongst ourselves – at least among those of us that are allies,” he said one afternoon as I walked along under a glade of trees with him.  “The ‘incidents’ have been happening more often of late and, though you are rare in that you can detect us with some regularity, it is not just you.  There are others that are beginning to know us – in regularity or in incident.” 

 

The thing that made my blood run cold, however, was when my new friend spoke of war. 

 

“A war is coming, I fear,” he said.  “If there is anything each and every hidden creature knows about you humans, is that change is difficult for you.  If our two worlds have wounds between them and are, indeed, bleeding into one another, I suspect a dramatic change to come very soon – too soon for the majority of your people to accept it.” 

 

“What do you think will happen?” I asked my new friend as I sat with him on a hill and stroked his good wing, viewing the sunset. 

 

“Your kind will go mad,” he said simply. 

 

“Aren’t I already mad… for being able to see you?”

 

“Perhaps,” he answered. 

 

I shuddered as the wind stirred up the grass around us.  I could not help but imagine a coming war in the near future in which myth bled into reality and humans reacted not with acceptance or interest, but with an ardent desire to kill myth. 

 

As it turns out, I was right.       


End file.
